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Encrypted home and swap partition on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic

I have always wanted to encrypt my /home partition on my notebook. Due to lack of time and the worries of data lose i never got round to it. But now the time has finally come. Please be careful following this howto if you do anything wrong you may erase all of you data. You have been warned!

aptitude install cryptsetup libpam-mount

We will start of with the swap partition which is easy. First deactivate your swap partition you may need to remove it from /etc/fstab and reboot if it is in use.:

It worked flawlessly in 9.04 when the boot process would pause while you entered your encryption password under the ubuntu boot splash logo. Enter it correctly and the boot process would continue so you would log in transparently with an encrypted /home partition.

In 9.10, using the exact same setup process, something corrupts somewhere. The luks password prompt doesn’t appear on the graphical boot screen but on virtual console #1.
Also the boot process doesn’t halt while you enter this password but continues to the graphical user login, with no mounted home partition available.
Also, even after entering the password, virtual terminals 1-6 are subsequently unavailable to users.

I’m about the set up an encrypted partition on a 9.04 machine to try and see where the differences are in the boot process.

Yes i can confirm this does work. I have been using this setup since karmic alpha 6 without a problem. The only problems i experienced were related to the /tmp partition which was formatted on boot. Ubuntu sometimes stopped booting waiting for crypto /tmp so i stopped using a encrypted /tmp for now. I unlock my /home partition with lib pam mount once the user logs in via GDM which works really well.